Tuesday Morning Club: An Hour in the KPFA Music Department Office, 1970 Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 67 min Event Type: Other Finds Program Origin: KPFA Additional Media Files (click to view) Charles Amirkhanian fills in for the absent Julian White for this edition of KPFA’s Tuesday Morning Club. Rather than playing a selection of elegant classical music, Amirkhanian takes this opportunity to give listeners a feel for what the Music Department Office was like during a typical day in 1970. Fielding phone calls from Liam O’Gallagher, moving boxes, answering questions for staff and volunteers, it's all here in this fascinating peek behind the KPFA curtain. Also included are musical works by Colin McPhee, a Canadian composer who became one of the first Western ethnomusicologist to study the gamelan music of Bali, and his fellow ultra-modern composer and publisher, Henry Cowell. Musical Selections: Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra (1936) (17:07) / Colin McPhee -- Fiddler’s Jig, for violin and st...

New Music America: 1980: Selected Highlights, Program 2 Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 111 min Event Type: Music Program Origin: MPR From a program produced by Minneapolis Public Radio (MPR) and the Walker Art Center, Nigel Redden, Director for Performing Arts at the Minneapolis based Center, introduces selected performances from the 1980 New Music America Festival, which was held over nine days in June 1980. This second in a series of four programs, begins with “Pattern Study No 2” an aleatoric piece for piano saxophone, trombone, percussion and double bass, composed by Stacey Bowers. This is followed by the final movement of “Dryer” one of a number of short “Shaggy Dog Operas” by Tom Johnson. This humorous and slightly minimalist piece features the composer on piano and a baritone who catches fish and hangs them up to dry while a tenor looks on, wondering why. The next piece, “Sunrise Celebration” is by Charlie Morrow, in which a local Minnesota drum and bugle corps performs as a hardy audience...

Ode To Gravity: Pianos Not Rag Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 58 min Event Type: Interview and Music Program Origin: KPFA Originally billed as a survey of recorded keyboard literature simultaneous with a production of “The Verbal Séance Players”, this program is a mix of music, (mostly piano, but also some jazz), and bits of orchestral works, seemingly randomly overlaid with multiple tracks of poetry, recited by a variety of voices. One of the pieces of poetry is tentatively identified at the start of the program as being “Words” a 1969 text-sound composition by Charles Amirkhanian. However sometimes the whole is greater than the parts, and perhaps it is more important to just let the tape roll and enjoy the sonic experience rather than conduct an analysis of its constituent parts. Musical Selections: [a mix of mostly unidentified music and poetry] Performers: The Verbal Séance Players: Emily Levin, as Melvin Jahn Larry Bensky, as Gertrude Stein Jean Blair, as Satan Gerard Van der Leun, as The Ci...

Words: Program No. 7: Alvin Curran Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 62 min Event Type: Spoken Word Program Origin: KPFA One in a series of programs produced by Clark Coolidge that feature the works of late 20th century poets, sound poets, and authors. This recording, broadcast on October 13, 1969, features two tape works by Alvin Curran. The first piece, “A Day in the Country: Part 1” is a compilation of ambient recordings made in Italy that range from the sound of children playing to those of a walk along a shoreline. These sounds have then been spliced together so as to form a continuous soundscape reminiscent of, appropriately enough, spending a day in the countryside. The second composition, “The Rubber Bee,” made in collaboration with Clark Coolidge, is a slightly more traditional piece of sound poetry, although it is sparser than many examples in this series. Musical Selections: A Day In The Country: Part 1(1969) (35:30) / Alvin Curran -- The Rubber Bee (1969) (23:35) / Alvin Curran & Clark C...

World Ear Project: Field Recording for Theater and Film Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 59 min Event Type: Other Finds Program Origin: KPFA Jim LeBrecht and Andy Wiskes discuss their formidable audio contributions to film and theater, including their critically acclaimed soundtrack collaboration on the 1986 Berkeley Repertory Theater’s production of Tennessee William’s “The Night of the Iguana”. LeBrecht, the resident sound designer of more than fifty performances with the Berkeley Rep., and Wiskes, a sound man for such feature films as “Where the River Runs Black” and “Howard the Duck”, present ambient recordings from one of their productions, as well as a field recording made in the Amazon rain forest. This show is co-hosted by Richard Friedman, Susan Stone, and Charles Amirkhanian. (from KPFA Folio) Musical Selections: [storm sequence from “The Sea”] -- [sounds of the Amazon rain forest] Genre: Field Recordings Subject: Soundscapes (Music) ; Field recordings ; Music in theaters ; Ambient sounds...

Other Minds Festival: OM 11, Concert 2: 01 "Son of Metropolis San Francisco" by Charles Amirkhanian Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 28 min Event Type: Music Program Origin: Other Minds Additional Media Files (click to view) OM 11 presented a 60th birthday tribute to Other Minds founding artistic director Charles Amirkhanian featuring the San Francisco concert premiere of his radiophonic tape piece, “Son of Metropolis San Francisco”. The work is a part-abstract, part-representational audio snapshot of idiosyncratic Bay Area sounds, ranging from barking elephant seals at Ano Nuevo Beach to a runaway overflow valve next to a hot tub at Harbin Hot Springs. In between, listeners hear Tongan gardeners, a Chinese sitcom, and conga drummers at Ocean Beach, manipulated on a Synclavier digital synthesizer and ultimately offset by a hypnotic and meditative organ chorale. Originally commissioned by Studio 3 Hörspiel of the West German Radio in Cologne, and New American Radio for the NPR satellite system, the ...

Other Minds Presents: A Civil Rights Reader: for strings, laptop, and DJ Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 109 min Event Type: Music Program Origin: Other Minds Full of energy and passion, the spirited Del Sol String Quartet reunite with Daniel Bernard Roumain (whose “String Quartet No. 4” they premiered at Other Minds 11 in March 2005) for an evening of cutting edge music-making. Daniel Bernard Roumain is a pioneer in new forms, as he marries the instrumentation of string quartet with electric violin, laptop, and a Hip-Hop turntablist. This first-ever presentation of all four of his works for the quartet medium celebrates iconic figures of American Civil Rights who are the dedicatees of each piece: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Maya Angelou. The program concludes with a brief panel discussion in which Roumain and DJ Scientific discuss their musical partnership and perform Roumains signature work for violin “Filter.” Part 1 of 3: Musical Selections: String Quartet...

World Ear Project: Series 2, April 22, 1985 Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 118 min Event Type: Other Finds Program Origin: KPFA This program is the third in a new series of ambient field recordings from around the world. The original World Ear Project series was broadcast on KPFA in the early 1970s, as the portable cassette recorder first made such an ambitious undertaking economically affordable. In this, the second series, the idea of collecting sounds from unique and unusual environments from all over the world remains the same, however the advances in field recording technologies, including digital recording, make for a much higher quality experience. In this program Charles Amirkhanian, and Richard Friedman, present tapes recorded in San Francisco, and other locations. Part 1 of 2: Musical Selections: [thunderstorm, San Francisco, California, Sept. 19, 1984] / Paul Cardier (sp?) -- [desert wilderness] / John Sunier -- [Oak woodland] / John Sunier -- [Chinese New Years Parade, San Francisco, ...

Morning Concert: John Oswald & Pauline Oliveros Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 112 min Event Type: Interview and Music Program Origin: KPFA Charles Amirkhanian talks with the two great O's of the 1990s, plunderphonicker John Oswald and deep listener Pauline Oliveros. Hailing from Toronto, Oswald has astounded audiences with his technoripoffaudacities, which have landed him in trouble with Canadian record industry authorities. In this interview Oswald discusses why he uses other people's music to create his own. Pauline Oliveros currently lives in Kingston, New York, although her formative years were spent in the Bay Area. All through the days when musical intellectuals were disdaining sumptuous sound, Oliveros has been readying the Platonic sonic hot tub. We hear selections from her Deep Listening Band’s CD, “Troglodyte’s Delight”, and get both artists opinions on the state of dialogue regarding censorship, the NEA, and copyright issues in the field of music. (from KPFA Folio) Part 1 of 2: Musica...

A Stereophonic Journey Through India Listen Item Type: Sound Recording Duration: 89 min Event Type: Other Finds Program Origin: KPFA Jean-Louis Derche traveled to India in the summer of 1971 and faithfully recorded temple music in several out-of-the-way locations. Even more remarkable are his unusual recordings made in the streets of Benares, Chidambaran, Madurai, Tanjour, and Trivandrum. Listen to the sounds of rickshaws; a walk down a narrow street; craftsmen hammering metal; and the timeless flow of the Ganges River. Derche’s companion, photographer Monique Sidi, provided illustrations of the journey, for use in the September 1972 KPFA Folio [https://archive.org/details/kpfafoliosep72paci]. Mr. Derche, a computer scientist in Berkeley at the time of this KPFA recording in 1972, has since disappeared from sight. This was his first and only known radio project. Part 1 of 2: Genres: Soundscapes ; World Music Subject: Ambient sounds ; Soundscapes (Music) ; Music -- India ; Ethnic music ; World music People: Am...